Andrew McCarthy for the defense

Andrew McCarthy is the former Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and his friends for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After he secured convictions, he recounted what he had learned along the way in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. When it comes to understanding the Islamist war against the United States, Andy is like Walt Whitman: He is the man, he suffer’d, he was there. I find myself returning regularly to this book.

You may recall that a recent White House guest from a terrorist group in Egypt called for the release of the Blind Sheikh. Something’s happening here. (This past Sunday I posted my video of Rep. Michele Bachmann discussing the incident before our local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition.)

Among these events are a few in our own backyard, including the election of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison in 2006, a man who embodies the alliance between Islam and the Left. In the book McCarthy rightly characterizes Ellison as “CAIR’s congressman.” McCarthy also discussed the case of the flying imams — a case he called “the sabotage campaign in action”– arising from an incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after an imams’ conference at which Ellison had spoken. McCarthy also devoted an entire chapter to “The Enclave of Minnesota.” Please check out this book if you haven’t already.

Andy was invited by the Center for Security Policy to speak at the National Press Club in Washington on Wednesday. As Andy explains here, where he has posted the text of his speech, the topic was the relatsionship between the United States government and the Muslim Brotherhood. Introduced by the CSP’s Frank Gaffney, McCarthy explains why concerns about Brotherhood infiltration raised by five conservative House members, including our own Michele Bachmann, have substantial evidence to support them. Paul Mirengoff writes here about the attack by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank on the speech.

The speech runs nearly an hour followed by a lengthy question-and-answer period. Given the salience of the speech to matters we have discussed here repeatedly, and the beating that Michele and others cited by Gaffney have taken for raising their concerns — Michele has been under an unrelenting attack in the Star Tribune, for example — I am posting the video of Andy’s speech below.